At last week’s Think 2019 conference,
IBM made a splash with its announcement that its Watson AI platform would run on the
Amazon AWS,
Microsoft Azure, and
Google Cloud Platform public clouds as well as on-premises enterprise environments.

This full-throated support of hybrid IT eclipsed a related announcement that IBM is rolling out the new IBM Cloud Integration Platform, thus throwing its hat into the increasingly crowded Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) market.

Given the fact that the word ‘hybrid’ appears twice in the paragraph above, it would be easy to assume that the ‘hybrid’ in ‘hybrid IT’ means the same thing as the word when it appears in ‘Hybrid Integration Platform.’

A closer look at the HIP terminology, however, uncovers a confusing, but important distinction. Hybrid integration isn’t hybrid because it refers to integration for hybrid IT (even though many companies will use it for such).

Instead, ‘hybrid integration’ means ‘a mix of different integration technologies’ – and such a mishmash may very well work at cross purposes to the very hybrid IT strategy that it is meant to support.

Cloud native service meshes are the future of hybrid integration

Peter Burka

It’s Square to be HIP

In fact, if you look at the vendors who are beating the HIP drum the loudest, this pattern becomes clear: not only IBM, but Axway,
Oracle, Software AG, Talend, and
TIBCO are all touting their newfangled HIPs. Look under the covers of all of these incumbent vendors’ offerings, however, and you’ll see a mix of different products new and old, as though aggregating a bunch of SKUs automatically creates a platform.

In IBM’s case, for example, the new IBM Cloud Integration Platform includes Apache Kafka (for event streaming), IBM Aspera (for high speed data transfer), Kubernetes for orchestration of containers for microservices, and the venerable IBM MQ.

IBM MQ, in fact, dates from 1993, when it was MQSeries. In the 2000s, IBM dubbed it WebSphere MQ, and now it’s part of Big Blue’s Cloud Integration Platform.

Of course, IBM and the other incumbents on the list above see no problem mixing in legacy integration technologies with newer, cloud-based ones – since after all, enterprises are themselves running a mix of legacy and cloud. Wouldn’t it make sense, therefore, for a HIP to consist of such an aggregation of capabilities?

Gartner, in fact, is championing HIP for enterprises who have to deal with high levels of IT complexity. “In most cases, the traditional integration toolkit — a set of task-specific integration tools — is unable to address this level of complexity,” explains a ‘Smarter with Gartner’ article. “Organizations need to move toward what Gartner calls a hybrid integration platform, or HIP. The HIP is the ‘home’ for all functionalities that ensure the smooth integration of multiple digital transformation initiatives in an organization.”

Incumbent integration vendors are perfectly happy with Gartner’s take, as it justifies peddling their customers a mishmash of old and new integration technologies and labeling it a platform. In fact, this perspective aligns with Gartner’s flawed bimodal IT philosophy (Why flawed? See my article on bimodal IT from 2015).

The result: bimodal integration. “Addressing the pervasive integration requirements fostered by the digital revolution is urging IT leaders to move toward a bimodal, do-it-yourself integration approach,” according to a 2016 report by Gartner analysts Massimo Pezzini, Jess Thompson, Keith Guttridge, and Elizabeth Golluscio. “Implementing a hybrid integration platform on the basis of the best practices discussed in this research is a key success factor.”

Bimodal Integration: Missing the Point of Hybrid IT

There’s no arguing with the fact that the bimodal IT pattern is a reality for many large enterprises. The argument, instead, is whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Today’s discussions of hybrid IT, in fact, are increasingly recognizing that bimodal IT is an anti-pattern, and that there’s a better way of dealing with diverse environments and technologies than separating them into ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ modes.

Case in point: Hybrid IT is a workload-centric management approach that abstracts the diversity of deployment environments, enabling organizations to focus on the business value of the applications they deploy rather than the specifics of the technology appropriate to one environment or another.

In direct opposition to bimodal, the best practice approach to hybrid IT is actually cloud native. “Cloud-native is an approach to building and running applications that exploits the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model,” according to the Pivotal web site. “Cloud-native is about how applications are created and deployed, not where.”

The most important characteristic of this definition of cloud native is that it’s not specific to the cloud. In fact, you don’t need a cloud at all to follow a cloud native approach – you simply need to adopt an architecture that exploits the advantages of the cloud delivery model, even if it be on premises.

Instead of the HIPs the incumbent integration vendors deliver that reinforce the bimodal IT model, therefore, enterprises should move toward cloud native integration approaches that abstract the underlying technology wherever it may be, rather than connecting it up with a mishmash of older and newer tools.

Confusion over Cloud Native Integration

If you’re thinking at this point of throwing out that Gartner HIP report and shopping for a cloud native integration offering, well, not so fast. First, cloud native integration is still quite new and relatively immature, especially when compared with the HIP components from the incumbents.

Second, in many cases, what a vendor calls ‘cloud native integration’ is not cloud native at all – or at least, doesn’t fall under the same definition as the one above.

For example,
Red Hat has recently announced Red Hat Integration, which it touts as a cloud native integration platform. Look under the covers, however, and it consists of an aggregation of older products, including AMQ, Fuse Online, and others.

Red Hat is thus aligning Red Hat Integration more with Gartner’s notion of HIP than architecting a new product that would qualify as cloud native. “We’re finding that customers are building integration architectures that include capabilities from multiple products, so we created a dedicated SKU and brought all of the capabilities from our integration portfolio together into a single product,” explains Sameer Parulkar, integration manager at Red Hat. “All of these pieces are tied together in a more unified way, managed via a familiar interface.”

The Blurred Line Between Cloud Native Integration and iPaaS

What Red Hat means by ‘cloud native’ thus seems to be more about running in the cloud than building a cross-environment abstraction – but such a distinction is still a blurry one.

A vendor that blurs this line further is
Dell Boomi. Boomi is a mature Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) offering, which means it runs in the cloud and customers access it as a cloud service.

Simply running as a cloud service, however, doesn’t automatically qualify a product as cloud native. That being said, Boomi does walk the cloud native walk. “A cloud-native integration cloud eliminates the need for customers to purchase, implement, manage and maintain the underlying hardware and software, no matter where they process their integrations,” the Boomi site explains, “in the cloud, on-premise or at the network edge.”

To its credit, Boomi’s approach flies in the face of Gartner’s thinking around HIP. “In a hybrid IT environment, the Boomi platform can be deployed wherever it makes sense to support integration: in the cloud, on-premise or both,” the Boomi site continues.

Another iPaaS vendor that is aligning itself with the cloud native integration story (while simultaneously trying to play the HIP card) is SnapLogic. “We’ve proven that we’re that one integration platform that is both easy to use and powerful enough to handle a broad set of integration scenarios,” touts SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon, “spanning application integration, API management, B2B integration, data integration, data engineering, and more – whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments.”

Service Meshes: The Future of Cloud Native Integration

If you had the luxury of designing cloud native integration starting with a blank sheet of paper, it wouldn’t look at all like HIP – and it probably wouldn’t look much like iPaaS, either.

What it would look like is more what the Kubernetes/cloud native community is calling a service mesh. “A service mesh is a configurable, low‑latency infrastructure layer designed to handle a high volume of network‑based interprocess communication among application infrastructure services using application programming interfaces (APIs),” explains the Nginx web site.

This definition is on the technical side, but the key takeaway is that service meshes abstract network-level communication with APIs, thus supporting a hybrid IT abstraction layer that is able to achieve all the performance you’d expect by implementing integration at the network layer.

Implementations of service meshes like the ones Nginx is talking about, however, are barely off the drawing board. “Istio, backed by Google, IBM, and Lyft, is currently the best‑known service mesh architecture,” the Nginx site continues. “Kubernetes, which was originally designed by Google, is currently the only container orchestration framework supported by Istio.”

Nginx adds an important caveat. “Istio is not the only option, and other service mesh implementations are also in development.” Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall: as cloud native integration matures, the bimodal integration approaches popular today will become increasingly obsolete.

It’s no coincidence that IBM is backing Istio, of course. The question of the day, therefore, is when – or if – the other incumbent integration vendors will have the courage to follow suit.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, IBM, Microsoft, Software AG, and SnapLogic are former Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Peter Burka.